Carnival Makes Controversial Price Increases #travel #cruisenews #cruise #cruiselife #IslandTime

They shared yesterday evening via email, "We're increasing the price of two different things. One is our gratuitities. They were $16 per person per day. For standard stateaterooms, they're going up to $17 per person per day. One whole dollar. And for sweets, they were $18. Now they're $19. $1 per person. For you casino players, that's a red chip and two blue chips. That's pretty cheap."

I'm going to give Carnival some credit here. I'm going to call them out. Number one, they let us have some time to secure these items at the old price.

Carnival Cruise Line could have increased the gratuitities to what whatever they wanted to. Royal Caribbean is $18.50 per person per day. Carnival could have said, "We're matching Royal Caribbean." They could have said we're going 19 or $20. Norwegian's at $20 and Margaritavville is at 22. But they just raised them a dollar, which still remains some of the lowest in the industry.

But people are still upset. And I would argue they're not upset about this specific change, but they're upset about the changes the last several years. Increases in price of gratuitity, specialty dining, Wi-Fi, drink packages.